Creating an Ecological Society. Chris Williams
Plastics Are Forever
Plastic production, an essentially post–Second World War industry, increased from less than 2 tons in 1950, to over 340 million tons by 2014.27 After a single use, 95 percent of all plastic is lost to the production process, escaping into the wider environment: oceans, landfills, or incinerators. Because plastics are synthetic carbon-based polymers that didn’t exist on Earth until seventy years ago, few organisms have evolved to be able to metaboliz them.28 One-third of all plastic is not recaptured, going directly into the environment, often ending up in the ocean (the second-largest percentage goes to landfill). If things continue as they are, in thirty-five years the plastic in the oceans will weigh more than fish.29
Needless to say, vast quantities of plastic threaded throughout the watercourses of the world have drastic implications for life of all kinds. In yet another negative ramification for leatherback turtles, plastic bags floating through the oceans look almost exactly like large undulating jellyfish. When plastic bags are ingested, they will often choke the turtles, causing them to be asphyxiated or starve. A study from 2015 estimates that more than half of all turtles and 90 percent of seabirds have ingested plastic.30 In January 2016 necropsies on twenty-nine beached sperm whales stranded in the North Sea showed the animals had ingested massive quantities of plastic, including, in one case, a 40-foot-long fishing net. Robert Habeck, minister of the environment for Schleswig-Holstein, observed that the animals were made “to starve with full stomachs.”31 Just like those whales, humans who eat fish are almost certainly ingesting chemicals derived from plastic, along with a host of other contaminants.
Estimates vary, but upward of 500 billion plastic bags are manufactured every year, requiring 12 million barrels of oil.32 Paper bags are no friendlier to the environment: it takes four times as much energy and three times as much water to make paper bags, producing fifty times more water pollution and about 70 percent more pollution than the manufacture of plastic bags. Millions of trees are cut down that could otherwise be absorbing carbon dioxide; paper is difficult to recycle and takes up more space in landfill.33 The real answer is not to manufacture any bag designed for a single use (or for that matter, most other products). But because industry is so strongly opposed to that, efforts to ban single-use plastic containers have had limited success.
As plastic is now pervasive throughout the environment and will last so long without degrading, it has been proposed as one way to measure the impact of humans in the Anthropocene:
Plastics are now widely enough distributed to characterize such strata over large parts of the world, even in remote environments such as that of the deep sea floor and the polar regions. Especially in marine sediments, microplastics form superficially invisible, but potentially widespread markers, directly akin to microfossils in more conventional palaeontology…. Stratigraphically, plastics within sediments comprise a good practical indicator of Anthropocene strata…. Their correlation potential, though, now stretches out into space, as they have now been carried across the solar system by spacecraft, and placed in orbit around the Earth and on the surface of the Moon and Mars.34
In other words, not only has a single planet been poisoned—contamination of the whole solar system is occurring. A product with extremely useful and important properties has been produced but maladapted to its most appropriate and least damaging applications, used in short-term ways that cause immense pollution and long-term harm to the biosphere and beyond.
The Scourge of Air Pollution
Considered to be the largest environmental problem to threaten human health, the severe health implications of air pollution are only beginning to be fully quantified.
Energy production and use is the single largest contributor to air pollution. The smoke emitted by indoor sources for cooking, heating, and light (wood, charcoal, kerosene, etc.), which are used by 2.7 billion people, is estimated to be responsible for 3.5 million annual premature deaths.35
An estimated 166 million people—over half the U.S. population—live under conditions exposing them, simply by breathing, to high ozone and particulate air pollution.36 In 2011, air pollution from the U.S. energy industry caused $131 billion in damage, mostly in health impacts.37 According to a slightly earlier study by the National Academy of Sciences, all 137,000 coal miners in the United States could be given tax-free pensions of $50,000 a year for only 10 percent of the cost of the air pollution generated by the production of energy from burning coal.38 On a global scale, the economic and health impacts of air pollution are staggering. According to the World Health Organization, the cost in Europe alone comes to almost 10 percent of the combined European Union economy, $1.6 trillion:
Over 90% of citizens in the Region are exposed to annual levels of outdoor fine particulate matter that are above WHO’s air-quality guidelines. This accounted for 482,000 premature deaths in 2012 from heart and respiratory diseases, blood vessel conditions and strokes, and lung cancer. In the same year, indoor air pollution resulted in an additional 117,200 premature deaths, five times more in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries.39
It’s important to bear in mind that Europe is often held up as a model of environmental probity. Yet in 2016, some areas of London exceeded their annual limit for nitrogen dioxide levels within the first week of January. Despite the much-touted imposition of congestion charges and early adoption of bike-sharing programs, as well as air pollution controls dating back to the 1950s, London exhibits levels of nitrogen oxides on a par with Beijing and Shanghai.40
The World Health Organization has conducted pollution research in over 2,000 cities across the world. María Neira, head of public health at WHO, comments on the results:
We have a public health emergency in many countries from pollution. It’s dramatic, one of the biggest problems we are facing globally, with horrible future costs to society…. Air pollution leads to chronic diseases which require hospital space. Before we knew that pollution was responsible for diseases like pneumonia and asthma. Now we know that it leads to bloodstream, heart and cardiovascular diseases, too—even dementia. We are storing up problems. These are chronic diseases that require hospital beds. The cost will be enormous.41
Health impacts in less developed countries with little or no pollution controls, such as India and China, are even worse. In China alone, 4,000 people die every day from the health impacts of breathing polluted air—close to 1.5 million per year. Worldwide, an estimated 6.5 million people die prematurely each year because of air pollution, “making this the world’s fourth-largest threat to human health, behind high blood pressure, dietary risks and smoking.”42
The number of cars in the world is set to double in fourteen years to over two billion, the vast majority run on fossil fuels. The effect of this increase will completely wipe out any potential gains in fuel efficiency. As a result, climate change and the effects on humans and all other life forms of air pollution, already severe, can only worsen.43
William Blake’s famous poem “Jerusalem” speaks of “dark Satanic Mills,” evoking a time in England of child labor, sixteen-hour days, and rampant, unchecked pollution. But this is no bygone era: the ever-growing capitalist economy that by its nature ignores environmental effects has taken Blake’s dark vision global. “This is the first generation in human experience exposed to such high levels of pollution,” says María Neira. “In the 19th century pollution was bad, but it was concentrated in just a few places. Now there are huge numbers of people living with high levels of pollution. Nearly 70 percent of people in cities are exposed to pollution above recommended levels.”44
According to a study in the journal Nature, premature deaths from outdoor pollution in Asia amount to 3.3 million people per year, which is more than the combined death toll from malaria and HIV/AIDS.45 The majority of this pollution is from cooking and home heating using coal, kerosene, and biomass such as wood and animal dung as energy sources. A simple and entirely possible switch to clean, renewable energy sources would have immediate and immensely positive health impacts for humans and other species. Eliminating or vastly reducing the use of fossil fuel–based private transportation—cars and